Bon appetit for destruction

It’s three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon and Dylan McGrath is taking a breather after cooking lunch for a bunch of suits who’ve flown in for the BMW 7-Series launch in Dublin 4’s impossibly plush Alto Vetro building.

He has to rustle up a bit of supper for them, and then it’s off to his Mint restaurant in Ranelagh to make sure it maintains its usual Michelin starred standards.
The 31-year-old’s chef whites – or filthies as they really ought to be called – are covered in haute cuisine stains, and his stubble is more can’t be arsed to shave than designer.
“I’m not one of those mumsy chefs you get on shit afternoon TV shows turning out fucking pies and dodgy looking desserts,” McGrath says, forever ruining his chance of cosying up to Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh. “What’s that old football saying? It’s not a matter of life or death – it’s more important than that. You make sacrifices, work your arse off 16 hours a day and don’t worry about ruffling feathers along the way.”
We’ll return to that ruffling of feathers, as he so understatedly puts it, later. It’s fair to say that over the past few years cooking has replaced comedy as the new rock ‘n’ roll, bringing with it a group of mavericks like Heston Blumenthal, James Martin, Ferran Adriá, Angela Hartnett and fellow Irish Michelin man Kevin Thornton that McGrath comfortably fits into.
Born on August 4, 1977 in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, he spent his first six years in Carlow before being transplanted to the Falls Road at the height of the Maggie Thatcher exacerbated Troubles.
“Going into the Christian Brothers Secondary School on the Glen Road in West Belfast with a different accent and being called Dylan was one hell of a culture shock,” he reflects. “My mother had just got married to a hard-nosed Belfast man who was very much of the, ‘Ah sure, it’ll toughen you up persuasion.’”
And did it?
“Yeah, you learned how to fight and take a beating – often from a teacher who wouldn’t think twice about closing the door and giving you a few slaps. You got the strap for being bold, though thankfully it was on the way out. They were tough times. A bomb would go off in the distance, and you wouldn’t even remark on it because that was your everyday reality. In Carlow we played cops & robbers, in Belfast it was hoods and Provis – the IRA and car thieves. Billy Connolly has this line about being a kid in the tenements in Glasgow, and not realising how rough it is because you don’t have anything to compare it to. Well, I did have something to compare it to.”
As he grew up, did those games of hoods and Provis become more real?
“A lot of my friends were joyriders who, caught by the IRA, would’ve either been shot or given a heavy punishment beating,” McGrath resumes. “If you had a problem, you didn’t ring the RUC. Policing was done by the Provos, though they didn’t have blanket support from the community. By the end of the ‘80s, certainly, quite a few people would’ve regarded them as vigilantes rather than protectors.”
Did he do anything that might have warranted a punishment beating himself?
“No, my parents had me on a pretty tight rein. I wasn’t allowed to stand on street corners, rob cars or sniff glue, which was another national sport when I was growing up. To this day my stepfather is one of the hardest people I’ve ever met – a real serious piece of work. There was no fucking messing with him, especially if it upset my mother.”
What does he do for a living?
“He’s a great man to tell you what to do, but has done fuck all himself. Anyway…”
Whether you’re an active participant or not, being surrounded by all that raw hatred must have some kind of effect on your psyche.
“If you’re a blank sheet when you’re born, the information you receive growing up would at best make you distrust the Protestant community. Did I want to become part of that (IRA) policing system? No. Did I agree with their ethics? A neighbour of mine was the Chief of Intelligence for the whole Belfast battalion and had spent 25 years in jail for suspected membership of the Provisionals. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and took the dog for a walk every day, but if a soldier was killed during The Troubles in Belfast the chances are he authorised it. It’s different from being born in Dublin and looking at it from the outside – these are people who are in your life every day.”
Of all the things West Belfast was known for during the ‘80s and early ‘90s, fine dining wouldn’t be one of them. How did Dylan catch the food bug?
“Without any sort of prompting, I started looking at cookbooks and imagining what the food would taste like in my head. I did my GCEs and then, because I wanted to move away from home and it involved a grant, enrolled at Portrush Catering College.”
Which presumably set him on the path to culinary fame and fortune.
“No, it was a nightmare,” he winces. “I was the worst in the class and got thrown out three times. I couldn’t give a shit. I wanted to be a chef, but was more interested in getting drunk, chasing women and everything.”
‘Everything’ being what precisely?
“General mayhem. Anything that pleased me, I did it. I was completely wayward and lacking in discipline, which is the opposite to the way I am now.”
“Fucked out” of Portrush Catering College, as he eloquently phrases it, McGrath had a rather more successful educational stint at the Belfast Institute, which lead to him “blagging” a head chef’s job in the local Jury’s Inn.
“I couldn’t cook, but I was fucking great at telling other people what to do,” he cackles. “I started learning properly about food when I went to Roscoff, which had the only Michelin star in Belfast, and then I was like a sponge. Whatever was going on in the kitchen, I wanted to understand it and be able to do it myself – only better. The competitiveness kicked in, which you have to have in this game or you’re fucked.”
This competition, which had been mainly of the friendly kind at Roscoff, took on a more sinsister hue when Dylan moved to London.
“You’d have guys turning your oven up when your back was turned, which meant everybody was on edge. I’ve seen punches thrown in a kitchen, headbutts and even a stabbing. There were stunts too like putting raw scallops in an extractor fan, so that you had toxic gasses wafting round the place, and a chef I knew eating a Scotch Bonnet, which is the hottest chili you can get, and vomiting for an hour.
“I’ve had some moments of my own,” he confesses, “like when I punched out a guy who’d been giving me the ‘You fuckin’ Paddy’ treatment. That ‘every man for himself’ thing isn’t something I allow in my kitchen though. You’ve a smaller set up in Dublin, so you need support. Like a football team, it doesn’t run on individuals. There are two types of people in a kitchen – those who are artistic and the grafters. It’s something special when you’ve got both skills.”
Which brings us to the controversy that erupted this year when McGrath was seen on an RTÉ documentary giving his staff the Alex Ferguson hairdryer treatment to the power of ten.
“What Dylan McGrath was actually doing in the kitchen was appalling and in this day and age there’s no need for that sort of behaviour,” was the verdict of rival chef Kevin Dundon on Tubridy Tonight. “In fact, if he trained his staff better he might not have to shout at them during service.”
“Kevin Dundon isn’t a fucking leading chef, let’s be honest,” Dylan responds. “He’s a housewife’s choice. I get a lot of stick for my aggressive style of management, but going back to that analogy, it is like a football team. You can be fucking sure that if you’re playing in the Premiership and let the side down with a kamikaze back-pass you’ll get a bollocking – not only off the manager but the captain.”
What about the other side of the equation, which is a sloppy kiss and a cuddle when you score?
“I don’t do kisses and cuddles, but it might be a wink or a laugh or a fucking joke. People aren’t going to come into work every day and support you if you all do is bastardise them out of it. You’ve got to feed their ambition.”
McGrath has in many ways taken over from that other enfant terrible of Irish cooking, Conrad Gallagher, who he briefly worked under before going to Mint.
“Conrad was here at a time when there was no food culture in Ireland,” Dylan reflects. “He was part of the Celtic Tiger – everything was jumping and bustling and he had the pizzazz and entrepreneurial skills to create that hype around himself. I was only in Conrad’s for a couple of months and it wasn’t my cup of tea at all. I didn’t think much of him as a chef, to be honest.”
Was there really mass hedonism going on behind the scenes, or is that a media exaggeration?
“I don’t know what he did privately. He liked to fucking party, but so did everybody at the time. People seem to think it was that and shagging models which lead to Conrad’s downfall, but I think it was more complicated than that.”
As something of a reluctant celebrity chef, what does he make of the ones who whore themselves to the media?
“You’ve some chefs in Ireland who are famous for, well, what? That sort of fucking afternoon show buzz. Are they great chefs? Are they in their kitchen? Are they disciplined? Do they understand flavour? Will they cook you something that you’ve never had before? Something exceptional that you can’t produce in the house? 90% of the time, no, not at all.”
Has he eaten his way round the other Michelin star restaurants here?
“Yeah, I’ve been in all of them. I was in San Sebastian this year and had some fantastic meals. I was in Robuchon in Vegas and had a fantastic meal. I was in Jean Georges in New York and had a fantastic meal. I’m not trying to be bad or slag anybody off, but nobody in Ireland’s at that level yet. ”
Apart from getting a second Michelin star for Mint – “Difficult but doable” – what’s next for Dylan McGrath?
“There are a couple of tapas places in Dublin and they’re pure shit,” he concludes. “They’re in the dark, which makes me laugh because you can’t even see what you’re fucking eating. I want to apply what I know to that medium, and have a midrange restaurant that does simple things incredibly well. I’ve kind of made a start at Mint with our tapas menu, which is things like langoustine ravioli, braised pig’s head and pumpkin soup paired with wine. Three or four ingredients – bam, bam, bam!”

You’ll find Mint at 47 Ranelagh Village, Dublin 6. The new Tapas Menu is available daily from 5.30pm to 7pm. Telephone (01) 497 8655 for reservations or log on to www.mintrestaurant.ie for more details.